March 14, 2009
2:43 a.m.
And Clover wrote:
Here's a simple one I've reinvented in my own apps often enough that it might be worth adding to the built-in split() method:
s.split(sep[, maxsplit[, pad]])
pad, if set True, would pad out the returned list with empty strings (strs/unicodes depending on returned datatype) so that the list was always (maxsplit+1) elements long. This allows one to do things like unpacking assignments:
user, hostname= address.split('@', 1, True)
without having to worry about exceptions when the number of ‘sep’s in the string is unexpectedly fewer than ‘maxsplit’.
Can you find a better use case? For splitting email address, I think I would want to know if the address turned out to be invalid (e.g. it does not contain exactly 1 @s)